Vault over any waist high object with a tap of a button and slow motion will kick in, allowing Wei to pick off targets with one slick headshot after another, thus extending his burst of bullet time. It would’ve been easy for Sleeping Dogs to simply turn into a stop and pop cover shooter at these points, and sure enough you can play it that way if you so wish, but Sleeping Dogs encourages a more aggressive approach on cover shooter conventions. That’s no bad thing, though, because not only is it a testament to the variety packed into the story’s twelve-hour running time but it also makes it more special when the guns do finally come out to play. It can be anywhere in the region of three to five hours before even getting your grubby mitts on a gun for the first time, and even then don’t expect the bullets to start flying beyond the odd mission and car chase here and there.
What you’ll spend the least amount of time doing in Sleeping Dogs is, oddly and refreshingly for this kind of game, shooting. UFG have really nailed it, and a good thing too because it’s what you’ll spend most of your time doing. Throw in a diverse range of melee weapons (from knives to umbrellas to… er… fish) and enemies that require different tactics to take down and you’ll find that this is no poor imitator of Rocksteady’s superlative combat system. Highlights include slamming an unfortunate soul onto a pallet of upturned swordfish heads, stowing somebody’s face into a furnace, and splattering a guy’s innards with a car engine. Wei’s more than capable of adding double joints to an assailant’s arm or leg without a moment’s hesitation (providing you’ve unlocked the corresponding moves), but the joys of combat come from grabbing hold of some poor hoodlum and spying any objects in the vicinity that flash red when a new fight breaks out, indicating said object can be used as an instakill instrument. But, as compensation, in a move reminiscent of Volition’s The Punisher game, Wei’s ace up his sleeve is the ability to utilise the environment to comically/gruesomely murderise his way through the onslaught of thugs that constantly queue up to die by his hands.
I say “almost” because Wei can’t quite move with the same fluid grace that dear old Bats can. All he needs is a cowl and a cape and you’d almost be forgiven for thinking that Bruce Wayne had relocated to Hong Kong. Clearly taking influence from Rocksteady’s Batman games, Wei can attack, counter and grab his opponents in a simple yet relatively deep combat scheme in bust-ups that always see the odds stacked up against him. Take the hand-to-hand combat for instance. It’s a concoction of existing and exciting ideas that translate into Sleeping Dogs’ gameplay just as well as you’d hope because everything here feels rock solid. No mean feat, eh? Naturally, Hong Kong cinema has been a huge inspiration on the team at UFG, as have about half a dozen games, with martial arts, parkour, and adrenaline-fuelled gunfights and car chases (often at the same time) all present and correct. You play as Wei Shen, an undercover cop tasked with the unenviable job of bringing down the Triads from within. So with the history lesson over, what exactly is Sleeping Dogs? If you haven’t sussed it out already, other than an excuse to dole out poor jokes about letting sleeping dogs lie (none of which you’ll find here), Sleeping Dogs is an open-world crime thriller set in Hong Kong (thank God it’s not New York for the umpteenth time). Nevertheless, saying it wasn’t going to be up to scratch was overly harsh and completely untrue, and while GTA V can rest easy, Saint’s Row 4 and Just Cause 3 should watch their backs. With games such as GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption ruling the open world roost, you’ve got to be a developer of Rockstar proportions in order to compete. Luckily the folks at Square Enix could see a potential hit and having played the finished product it’s not difficult to see why.Ĭredit where it’s due, there is an element of truth in what Activision said – sort of. However, a little over a year after the big reveal, the title was cancelled the reasons being that Activision couldn’t foresee an outcome where their investment would return a profit and that the game wouldn’t be able to compete with the genre’s top dogs (pun not intended), with CEO Eric Hirshberg adding that “it just wasn’t going to be good enough”.
#Sleeping dogs health shrine series#
When first announced to the world, United Front Games’ title sought shelter under Activision’s umbrella as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third entry in the open-world crime-em-up series that would hopefully reinvigorate the dormant franchise. Those who have been following Sleeping Dogs since its revival will likely know of its previous incarnation.